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On Python’s Type Annotation Strategy
Once again, I was reading an article, became tempted to comment, and then found myself writing such a long response that I felt it would be better here. (The article is initially for subscribers of LWN.net, with which I have a subscription thanks to their generosity in giving FSFE Fellows access upon their Fellowship renewal. The article will eventually become available to everyone after one week, which is the site’s policy. Maybe this blog post will encourage you to read the article, either eventually or as a subscriber.)
It was asserted that Haskell – a statically-typed language – doesn’t need type annotations because its type inference mechanisms are usually good enough. But generally, functional programming languages have effective type inference because of other constraints described by the author of the program. Now, Python could also benefit from such an approach if the language developers were willing to concede a few important properties of the language, but up to now the view has been that if a single property of Python is sacrificed then “it isn’t Python”. That’s why PyPy has had to pursue full compatibility, why the Nuitka author (who has done a heroic job despite detractors claiming it isn’t a worthwhile job) is trying to provide full compatibility, and why things like Cython and Shedskin get pushed to one side and/or ignored by everybody as they keep adding more stuff to the language themselves, which actually isn’t going to help make programs more predictable for the most part.
In the debate, an apparently irritated BDFL was served up a statement of his own from twelve years previously on the topic of Python no longer being Python once people start to change the syntax of the language to meet new needs. What type annotations risk is Python, as people read it, becoming something very different to what they are used to and what they expect. Look at some of the examples of type annotations and apart from the shapes of the brackets, you could start to think you were looking at parameterised template code written in C++. Python’s strength is the way you can write generic code that will work as long as the values you give a part of the program can support the operations being done, and the way that non-compliant values are properly rejected through exceptions being raised. If everybody starts writing “int, int, int” everywhere, the re-usability of code will really suffer; if people still want to express the type constraints properly, the conciseness of the code will really suffer because the type annotations will be necessarily complicated.
I think the BDFL has heard too many complaints about Python programs crashing over the years, but nobody has given him a better strategy than type annotations/declarations for dealing with such criticism. But then again, the dominant conservatism of Python language and CPython implementation development has perhaps resulted in that group being ill-equipped or ill-positioned to offer anything better. Personally, I see the necessary innovation coming from beyond the core development community, but then again, my own perspective is coloured by my own experiences and disappointments with the direction of Python.
Maybe progress – and a satisfactory remedy for negative perceptions of Python program reliability – will only be made when everybody finally has the debate about what Python really is that so many have tried to avoid having over the years. And no: “exactly what CPython 3.x happens to support” is not – and never has been – a valid circuit-breaker on that particular debate.